Er-Doped Fiber Laser Mode-Locked by CVD-Graphene Saturable Absorber

Erbium-doped fiber laser passively mode-locked by bilayer graphene is presented. The graphene layers were grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on Cu substrate and transferred onto a fused silica window, forming a saturable absorber (SA). Low non-saturable losses and modulation depth as high as 55% allowed to achieve soliton pulses with over 11 nm bandwidth and nearly-transform limited 315 fs duration at 1564 nm center wavelength. The paper describes the design of the laser construction, as well as the graphene-SA preparation process. Our study demonstrates, that CVD-Cu graphene transferred on glass substrate may be used for efficient mode-locking of fiber lasers.